Michigan archivists seek help in saving photographs of Lansing

Mar. 26, 2012

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Men ride steel beams above the Lansing skyline as they work on the Bank of Lansing building downtown in May 1930. / Archives of Michigan/Leavenworth Collection

For information on donating to the acquisition and preservation of the Leavenworth historical collection, go to www.michiganhistory.org or call Michigan History Foundation executive director Patricia Clark at 335-2796.

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R.C. Leavenworth’s photography career began in the lumber and mining camps of the Upper Peninsula and took a 20-odd-year detour through Boyne City before a group of Lansing businessmen who summered on Lake Charlevoix enticed him to move south in 1919.

They believed the city needed a commercial photographer, and Leavenworth, who drove a company car painted with the slogan “Anything photographed, anywhere, anytime,” proved more than equal to the task.

He and his employees documented Lansing’s transformation into an industrial city — and much more. They photographed assembly lines and shop floors, parades and strikes and publicity events, the construction of most every significant building that went up in the city in the mid-20th century.

They shot the massive Ku Klux Klan rally of 1924, the hanging wreckage of the Bath School after it was bombed by a disgruntled school board member 2½ years later, the Reo Motor Car Co. sit-down strike in the spring of 1937 and any number of more ordinary scenes: theater crowds and schools and shoppers clogging the city’s downtown.

The legacy of Leavenworth and the company that passed to his son-in-law, Hiram Marple, and later to an employee-turned-partner named Roger Boettcher is a collection of more than 200,000 negatives.

And a significant number of them are in danger.

Thousands have wrinkled, buckled, warped, fused together in bricks, deteriorated and deteriorating. They were made using cellulose nitrate and cellulose acetate films — both chemically unstable and the former highly flammable — and stored for years under less-than-ideal conditions.

A group of private donors has put a substantial portion of the collection into the hands of the Archives of Michigan, paying for the acquisition and preservation of many of the most important images. But the archives still doesn’t have the money to preserve every part of the collection it owns and there are tens of thousands of negatives that still belong to Boettcher, who is determined to sell at least some of them.

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State Archivist Mark Harvey called the collection “the most complete photographic record of the city.” He and the private foundation that supports some of the archives' work are still looking for donors who could acquire rest of the collection and pass it on to the archives.

“The truth is, though, if we just keep waiting, there will be nothing left to donate,” Harvey said.

Seeking a solution

From the mid-1960s until about a decade ago, Leavenworth’s historical collection was stored in the basement of the company’s building on Olds Avenue. When Boettcher sold the building, it was moved to an attic inside Impression 5 Science Center.

The space was secure and above flood level, but also vulnerable. High temperatures speed the deterioration of nitrate and acetate films and the attic heat could be stifling in summer.

That’s where Jim Anderson, a Michigan State University history professor, first saw the collection, introduced to it by Jim Walkinshaw, a retired General Motors Co. engineer turned Oldsmobile historian.

“Our project became how the dickens to get those negatives out of there,” Anderson said.

By 2005, the Capital Area District Library had taken an interest. Local history librarian David Votta had money from a donor to spend on collections and the library decided to pay for an appraisal.

It came back with two figures. If the collection were to be split up, it might fetch $290,000, the appraiser wrote, though it seemed unlikely that it would bring in that amount from a single buyer. He placed its value to the library at $116,000 on the assumption that the library would find only some of the images desirable.

The library made Boettcher an offer, a bit more than the lower number. He turned it down. He believed it was worth more.

Keeping them here

Boettcher learned photography in high school and honed his skills in the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War in the early 1950s. He went to work for Leavenworth Photographics in 1956, becoming a partner with Marple six years later and taking over the business after his death in 1987.

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Boettcher is still working at 80, operating out of an office in north Lansing, though he works fewer eight-hour days.

He understands the collection’s historical importance. But he is also a business owner whose working life is slowly winding down.

“I can’t afford to donate it,” Boettcher said.

There were interested buyers, including a man who wanted to buy the Oldsmobile photographs and take them out of state. That sent Anderson and a few others with an interest in their fate scrambling for a way to keep the negatives in Lansing.

“Lord knows, it was pain and heartbreak enough to lose five GM plants,” he said, referring to facilities the Detroit automaker and Oldsmobile owner closed over the years.

By 2007, a solution had taken shape. The negatives stored at Impression 5 would go to the Archives of Michigan, essentially on loan. The donors would buy pieces of the collection, the Oldsmobile negatives among them, and give them to the archives outright, allowing the agency to spend money to preserve them. The Michigan History Foundation, a private nonprofit, would raise additional money for the effort.

Walkinshaw had established the Oldsmobile History Center with his late business partner and co-author Helen Earley, though the materials they collected have since been move to the GM Heritage Center in Sterling Heights. He said the two of them had been interested in buying the Oldsmobile negatives for years, but held off for financial reasons.

He made the investment, he said, because it’s important that people here remember Lansing’s role in the history of the auto industry, the fact that Ransom E. Olds made the first mass-produced cars, that Oldsmobile was a pioneer of the V-8 engine, of chrome plating, that “the transmission that you have in your car today is an offshoot of the transmission we had in the 1901 curved dash Oldsmobile.”

“That is history of the car industry that we know,” he said, “and it is the history of Lansing.”

Deteriorating

In a back room at the Michigan Historical Center, there is a row of freezers filled with slim boxes that hold negatives from the Leavenworth Collection, just a portion of what the archives owns outright.

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Sitting across the room are boxes of negatives, some in advanced states of decay, though the even temperature and humidity has slowed it down. The portion of the collection that Boettcher has loaned to the archives is in storage off site. The noxious gases released as they broke down were bad enough that workers could smell the fumes three floors up.

“I’m sort of in this vicious cycle,” Harvey said. “We want to preserve it, but it’s not been donated to us, therefore I cannot expend funds to preserve it.”

Budget cuts

The archives’ budget has been cut by 35 percent over the last decade. Harvey said it’s often hard to find money to take care of the collections they already own. Even if the rest of the negatives were donated, he said, “we would have to do fundraising to take care of them.”

But if they stay where they are, they’ll eventually succumb to age and heat and humidity.

“That’s not going to happen in 10 years,” Harvey said, “but in 15 or 20 years, there will be very little left to salvage.”